Woodworking can be a very messy business. If you use power tools, you will have lots of planer shavings, sawdust and other pulverized wood products spewing out of every one of your machines.  For hand tool folks, you have saw dust, planer shavings and other unwanted wood byproducts in your shop as well.

Hey, it’s a tough life, but someone has to clean it up.

That’s where I tend to get a little creative.  Hey, I have two boys, and I try to get them to clean the shop for me.  I tell them it’s a really cool game they will love.

That hasn’t worked since I think they were eight and five…

Since then, I have come to rely on a trio of machines to help keep the mess at bay. In addition to keeping the dust off the floor, catching it at the source helps to keep it out of the air – and my lungs.  That’s why I rely on my Delta dust collector. I bought this baby back in 2004, and it has been a real love/hate relationship. When I hook it up to a tool that has a dedicated dust port, this thing is a champ. My new Ridgid planer works great with it, and there are usually just a few bits of planer shavings after I am done.

I also have it going through a shop-built cyclone separator that sits on top of a trash can. This contraption works well, spinning the majority of chips into the can before they get to the collector bag. I think it helps make the collector work more efficiently.

The hate part? When I try to hook a non dust port equipped machine to it (like my table saw), it stinks. The hose is heavy, and it doesn’t generate the suction to clear the dust from the large open area under the saw. Yes, I have seen the involved plans that allow you to build dust collection into your contractor’s saw, but no, I have never had the inclination to build one of them. I’d just rather be building furniture…

For the stuff that gets out of the table saw, I turn to my trusty shop vacuum. This baby sucks up everything, and with a dedicated floor cleaning fitting, it can make the place look relatively spotless in a short amount of time. That makes me happy…  I have also hooked it up to my combo belt/spindle sander, and the nozzle is a nice slip fit onto the port on that tool, making for very clean sanding sessions. It’s one of those tools you wonder how you get along without once you have to…

For really specialized dust collection, I turn to my Fein dust collector.  This baby is the bomb. It has an outlet built into it where you can plug the tool. In this case, I have my random orbit sander plugged in to the hose and into the machine.  When you turn the tool on, the power comes from the collector to power the tool, and it also turns on the collector’s motor. As you sand, the sawdust is pulled through the sander into the collector. When you lay off the trigger, the motor for the tool stops, and the collector runs for a few seconds more to ensure all of the dust is sucked into the canister. It also works great with my track saw, providing nearly dust free operation.

Now, I’m sure that some of you probably have more advanced whole shop systems, while others may be making due with smaller systems. But, one thing is for sure. My friend Mike Siemsen will give me a hard time for not relying on a simpler, more back to basics approach.

Now, if I can only find an apprentice who wants to use one of these babies…

This coming weekend is the St. Petersburg Woodcrafters Guild annual picnic on the shores of beautiful Lake Seminole Park in central Pinellas County. Sure, it’s getting a little warm to be outdoors in Florida this time of the year, but there are still just enough cool breezes – and a cold front nearby – to keep the temperatures tolerable. Besides – it’s an excellent opportunity to get to eat a bunch of great food and hang out with other woodworkers.  Oh, and I get to eat some Publix fried chicken… the local grocery chain makes the best stuff I have ever tasted.  Oh, boy, is it ever good….

One of the activities for the big day will be a carving event. Last year, a few pieces of basswood were handed out with a few carving knives, and everyone at the event got to work. There were some beautiful carvings, and it was easy to quickly see how good some of us were, and how far many of us have to go to do a good job!  But, that’s part of the fun of going to a woodworking picnic, right?

This year, I wanted to bring a knife I use in my shop. This is a Sloyd knife. My neighbor, originally from Sweden, told me that basically it is a craft knife that many Swedish woodworkers start off with as their first tool. It’s great for carving, slicing and other small shop tasks. I got mine a while back from a friend who saw it for sale in a shop up in New Jersey and sent it down to me. For years, it sat in my tool chest, just waiting for the day when I would use it.

As with most blades, it came from the store ground nicely, but needing a honing to really make it special. I have tried sharpening it by hand, but that can be tough on the fingers. The knife jig that came with my Tormek was available as well, but it never was able to get a good purchase on the blade – it was just too small.

That’s why I was pleased to get the newest jig from Tormek. The new small knife jig is a clever piece of tooling that had me honing in very little time. It basically consists of two parts – a cross bar of metal that gets clamped into the jaws of the jig’s knife blade, and a plastic clamp that works by grabbing the handle of the knife.

First, I set the cross bar of the jig into the jaws of the knife jig blade. It’s critical that you get this crosspiece aligned parallel with those jaws. This makes the next step a whole lot easier. Fortunately, if you flush up the front of that crossbar with the front edges of the jig, you are in the butter zone.

The next step is to clamp the knife handle into the plastic clamp. There is a screw clamp knob on the back of the jig that allows this to grab knife handles of many different shapes and sizes. Since the Sloyd knife I am using has a wonderfully contoured grip, it took a little finessing to find the sweet spot to clamp it in place. But, once it was there, the blade was parallel with the rest of the set up and it was ready to go onto the sharpener.

It was a simple matter to run the blade over the sharpening wheel on the first side, then flip everything over and move to the second. Since this is a dual bevel took – not a single like a chisel or plane iron – I had to make sure I had everything geared toward a 30 degree measurement – two 15 degree sides – to ensure everything came out well.  After the initial grind on the rough setup, I used the grading stone to make the wheel smooth and proceed to the honing.  After that,  a quick spin on the leather stropping wheel, and this baby was ready to cut.

Yeah, a clean slice through a piece of paper is a very good indication that I nailed it. With my new sharp knife, I’m looking forward to trying my hand at carving – or fending off other ravenous picnic goers who get too close to my fried chicken!